From: Destruction Bay, YT
To: Whitehorse, YT
Miles today: 164, 0
Total miles: 11404
[Warning -- long post today.]
I continued on the Alaska Highway from the outpost of
Destruction Bay through the slightly larger outpost of Haines Junction, and
then on to the full-fledged city of Whitehorse.
The day was overcast, so the views were not as nice as they could have
been. Still, winding roads between long,
narrow lakes and mountain ranges is always pleasant. Here is a typical view from today’s travels.
 |
| View from the Alaska Highway between Destruction Bay and Haines Junction, Yukon |
Whitehorse is a nice little city. (My new quick-and-dirty determinant of
whether a place is a big town or a small city is whether or not they have a
movie theater. Whitehorse has at least
two, albeit not 10-screen multiplexes.)
It is directly on the Yukon River, just a bit north (that is,
downstream) of the Whitehorse Rapids that are now drowned under the dammed
Schwatka Lake. The ex-rapids are the
original reason for the town coming into existence during the 1890’s Klondike
gold rush. Dawson, downstream on the Yukon, was where the action was, but it
was hard to get to. If you could somehow
get from Skagway, which is connected to the Pacific Ocean, to the place where
the Yukon River becomes navigable, the rest was a lot easier. Thus a tent city and then a real town sprang
up there very quickly. It was in the
river valley, so it was at lower altitude and protected from the wind, so
winters here are not as harsh as in the rest of Yukon Territory. Today almost
30,000 people live there, making it the largest city in Canada north of 60
degrees. It became the capitol around 1956
or 57 (versus Dawson), so today it is a government town as well as a small
college town and a big tourist town. It
is also the other end of the Yukon Quest dog sled race to or from Fairbanks.
There used to be a lot of steamboat traffic on the river,
but there is none now. There also used
to be a railroad that replaced the overland trail from Skagway to Whitehorse,
and from here on to Dawson, but it shut down in 1982. (I saw mentions of a seasonal tourist train
along this route, since the scenery is supposed to be terrific, but if it was
running I could not find it.) Today,
Whitehorse is at one end of the Klondike Highway, a paved road to Dawson, and
one of the midpoints on the Alaska Highway, which runs from more established
roads in British Columbia to the Fairbanks region. There are a lot of hotels in town, and all
seemed to be very busy during this, “the season.”
The old section of Whitehorse, between the river and what
is now their airport, is terrific. There
are lots of older buildings that are now hotels or small shops, and the newer
buildings make a sincere effort to fit in with the décor. It was fun to walk around. All around it, the city is spreading out in
more conventional ways, with subdivisions, big box stores, and office
buildings. I stayed downtown, in a hotel
that was very affordable (albeit with the usual WiFi issues), remaining there
an extra day to try to catch up on this blog as well as see some museums and
enjoy the city.
 |
| Scenes of Main Street, Whitehorse, Yukon |
One cool event I stumbled on to took place at the McBride
Museum of Yukon History, practically right next to my hotel. It was a concert by a four-piece band
(guitar, bass, keyboard, drums) by Hank Karr and the Canucks. Of course I had never heard of them, but it
turns out they are legends in Yukon.
There was a high school reunion starting the next night, Class of 1971
or 72 (just slightly older than me), and many of the people in the audience
came early to hear this concert. It
turns out that this was their favorite band – when they were still in high
school! – and they were still around and sounding great, 40 years later. Few of the songs were original; mostly
country and pop ballads from the 60’s and 70’s, but I could see the attraction.
They were fun, and they played and sang well. In New York or Washington DC,
where there are dozens of good bands competing for your attention, this alone would
not be a big deal. But up here, in “The North,” it’s a whole ‘nother
story. I bought a couple of their CDs –
which were being sold in the museum’s gift shop next to other locally produced
art.
 |
| Rowdy crowd watching Hank Kerr and the Canucks. Whitehorse. |
The concert also gave me a chance to talk to a number of
the people who went to high school in Whitehorse at about the same time as
me. Almost all of them love the place,
even those who moved away. They
confirmed for me that there is a difference between Canadians and “Northerners”
– those who live in the Territories above 60 degrees. They feel a sense of identity. They prefer softball to hockey (someone
actually told me this!) They may move to
Alberta for a job, but express the hope that they will be able to move back
when they retire.
I talked to one woman who had lived with her husband for
several years on Baffin Island, working for the Canadian government. She talked about how expensive any sort of
fresh foods like milk or berries were, and how therefore only a select few
could afford them at all (she was in this group). “Social issues? – you bet!” she said.
Another woman, of Inuit descent,
told me about how some things had changed since then. Back then, she said, there was pot and
alcohol; now it’s heroin and meth, and there are gangs and occasional gangland
killings in Whitehorse. Big city, big
city problems, even in the sub-Arctic. Finally,
I got to have a drink with Terry, Sue, and Dawn, three old friends here for the
reunion. I got some great stories about
what it was like to go to high school here at about the same time I was going
to high school in New Jersey.
An aside: Perhaps
the most interesting set of things that I have learned so far on this
motorcycle journey involves the ways in which groups of people differ versus
the ways in which they are the same. I
have had a number of people ask me, as a citizen of the US, to explain this
“confederate flag” thing to them. (All I
usually say is that I don’t understand it either.) Yet sometimes five minutes later someone will
complain about “all those Asians” in Vancouver.
People are fascinating.
One particularly interesting museum (to me, anyway) that
I just had to see was the Beringia Interpretive Center. Beringia (“Buh-RINJ-ee-ah”), it turns out, is
more than just the now-submerged land bridge between Alaska and Siberia. It was a huge area that was ice-free during
the entire Ice Age, and especially at its peak 20,000 years ago, due to low
precipitation. It was not marshy or
frozen tundra like the parts above water are today; it was dry grassland, and
supported lots of very large animals, including wooly mammoths and (my new
favorite) a beaver the size of a black bear.
We know a lot about these creatures because they often got trapped in
the permafrost, where they remained exquisitely preserved until miners, using
water guns to melt the permafrost in search of gold, uncovered them.
 |
| Giant Beaver skull next to existing relative; Beringia Interpretive Center, Whitehorse. Inuit "myths" describe these creatures in some detail; they were aggressive and would sometimes kill people. |
The animals on Beringia were blocked from moving to the
rest of North America by the vast, impassible glaciers. About 14,000 years ago, small birch or aspen
trees started to grow in some places, and this allowed another species – humans
– to move into Beringia as well. (Humans
needed fire to survive, and fire requires something to burn. There were “mammoth patties,” but they
apparently weren’t enough.) Here is the
kicker: the descendents of those people are still there. The Inuits have “myths” about vast flooding,
when a good part of their homeland was submerged under the sea – kind of like
Atlantis. (Unlike stories of Noah’s
flood, this one never receded.) The
warming of the climate that led to sea level rise of 300 feet or more also
opened up an ice-free path between the great eastern and western ice sheets
that allowed humans to enter the rest of North and then South America. This ice-free path follows, in part, the
route of the Dempster Highway that I battled with a few weeks ago. Very cool.
 |
| Beringia map, with my red and yellow notes added to the figure. |
No comments:
Post a Comment
Comments welcome.